Large, heavy meal may act as trigger for heart attack

The following is a list of what this article will not do.

It will not beg you to eat wisely over the holidays; it will not offer you tips on how to cut calories nor will it suggest alternative foods you can substitute for traditional holiday dinners - those fabulous meals with caloric contents strangely reminiscent of the national debt.

It will, however, let you know the effects of 229 grams of fat - the estimated amount consumed during a full-out Thanksgiving Day binge - on your digestive system and, alas, on your heart.

"There are certain cases you just don't forget," said Dr. Eric Chun, a board-certified emergency medicine physician at Kootenai Health. "Several years ago I had someone come into the ER on Christmas Eve complaining of digestive problems. Well, you know, you really hate to ruin somebody's holiday - you hope you can just send the person home with a case of mild indigestion.

"With this man I wasn't convinced though, so I told him that I was more worried about his next Christmas than this one and eventually decided to admit him to the hospital.

"I found out the next day - Christmas Day - that they'd just had to do an emergency triple bypass on him. That I hadn't sent him home the night before was my Christmas gift to myself."

Yes, massive indigestion and heart attacks have a tendency to mirror each other and sometimes, Chun said, it can be difficult for even physicians to tell the difference.

"Patients want to believe the most benign outcomes - they naturally want to minimize things," he said. "Pain in the high abdomen and lower chest areas needs to be assessed."

What accompanies this All-American attitude of only seeing the good side of things is the desire not to disrupt our beloved family celebrations with something we assume will be as trivial as a bellyache.

A professional paper presented several years ago at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions stated, "An unusually heavy meal may increase the risk of heart attack by about four times within two hours after eating. This finding indicates that eating a heavy meal may act as a trigger for a heart attack in much the same way as extreme physical exertion and outbursts of anger might - especially in someone who has heart disease."

Dr. Ronald Fritz, a board-certified cardiologist at Heart Clinic Northwest, explained the phenomenon that causes this. "Large meals, heavy exertion and severe emotional stress cause the release of adrenaline and noradrenaline and, when this happens, the heart beats faster, vessels constrict and blood pressure rises, thereby causing a higher risk of heart attack. Your heart has to pump a lot of blood to digest all that food you're eating.

"Also, a fatty meal can bring on a higher risk of a clot forming on a plaque in your coronary artery and this can block blood flow in your artery."

And we all know what that can mean.

The holiday eating season, which unofficially begins Halloween night and merrily intensifies during the two months leading up to New Year's can be, for some, more than a purely joyous time. Culturally, it has also evolved into a season of stress, depression, excess and high anxiety.

According to a university study published in 2004 in the medical journal, Circulation, "Heart-related deaths increase by 5 percent during the holiday season. Fatal heart attacks peak on Christmas, the day after Christmas, and New Year's Day."

The phenomena described above are also known as the Merry Christmas Coronary and the Happy New Year Heart Attack.

"You don't want to ruin somebody's Thanksgiving meal," Fritz said, "but before you sit down, consider how long you're going to have to work out to burn off that meal."

According to an American Council on Exercise spokesman, "A 160-pound person would have to run at a moderate pace for four hours, swim for five hours or walk 30 miles to burn off a 3,000-calorie Thanksgiving Day meal."

Ah yes. And then there is the drinking.